Drowning in the shallows

I’m a late adapter who is trapped by new technology

Afriend recently reprimanded me for not staying in touch. She’s a good friend so the reprimand wasn’t lightly delivered or received. My initial indignation was curbed by a cursory mental audit of my communications; she was right.

I could have blamed it on my move to Cape Town where friendliness (at least of the Gauteng variety) is discouraged. But that seemed a bit far fetched. After a little more scrutiny I realised it wasn’t Cape Town’s fault at all, it was Steve Jobs.

It was a rather shocking realisation. A brilliant but flawed individual whom I’d never met has had a dramatic impact on my daily life and in a remarkably short time. This puts Jobs up there with Joe Woodland, who invented the barcode.

This realisation struck me on the 10th anniversary of the introduction of Apple’s smartphone.

Just as the barcode has changed shopping and enabled the growth of multinational retail groups, the smartphone has changed personal communication and enabled the growth of new mega-industries.

Some of the change has been for the better but not all of it.

The plus side is that I’m no longer dependent on Telkom. They do pretend to care but, when the only communication options I had were a landline or expensive calls on a cellphone, the relationship was too one-sided to be healthy. Particularly given the ageing infrastructure in my area.

Now I can assume an almost Zenlike tranquillity when two weeks after reporting a dead phone I receive an SMS telling me Telkom will attend to my faulty service “shortly”. What an endearingly vague concept of time they have. And still the phone lies dead in the corner of the room.

There was a time when I would spend hours chatting on a landline.

But that has changed. I am what marketers call a late adapter (not as late as my neighbour who still communicates only by landline and letter) but slowly, almost imperceptibly, I embraced the radical new technology.

Now I am trapped in it.

First it was e-mails and perfunctory SMSES. These were useful for conveying impersonal messages while somehow never threatening the sort of personal involvement that comes with a call.

Then Whatsapp arrived, followed quickly by Whatsapp groups. It was easy and cheap to communicate with many people; except friends who don’t use Whatsapp.

But no matter how many emojis or pictures you use it doesn’t feel quite the same, it’s all a little too slick and impersonal.

As Nicholas Carr said of the Internet in The Shallows, the smartphone medium had changed the nature of our communication. It has made it circumspect and shallow.

Perhaps that was what our greatgrandparents thought when the phone was first invented and provided an alternative to physical contact. But it’s hard not to feel that the more we use smartphones to stay in touch the less we are really communicating. That feels a little sad.

And no matter how many emojis or pictures you use it doesn’t feel quite the same, it’s all too slick and impersonal